Searching for Sharing E-Book

Daniela Merolla

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In a world where new technologies are being developed at a dizzying pace, how can we best approach oral genres that represent heritage? Taking an innovative and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores the idea of sharing as a model to construct and disseminate the knowledge of literary heritage with the people who are represented by and in it.Expert contributors interweave sociological analysis with an appraisal of the transformative impact of technology on literary and cultural production. Does technology restrict, constraining the experience of an oral performance, or does it afford new openings for different aesthetic experiences? Topics explored include the Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library, the preservation of Ewe heritage material, new eresources for texts in Manding languages, and the possibilities of technauriture.This timely and necessary collection also examines to what extent digital documents can be and have been institutionalised in archives and museums, how digital heritage can remain free from co-option by hegemonic groups, and the roles that exist for community voices.A valuable contribution to a fast-developing field, this book is required reading for scholars and students in the fields of heritage, anthropology, linguistics, history and the emerging disciplines of multi-media documentation and analysis, as well as those working in the field of literature, folklore, and African studies. It is also important reading for museum and archive curators.

Leseprobe

SEARCHING FOR SHARING

Searching For Sharing

Heritage and Multimedia in Africa

Edited by Daniela Merolla and Mark Turin

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2017 Daniela Merolla and Mark Turin. Copyright of each chapter is maintained by the author.

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Daniela Merolla and Mark Turin (eds.), Searching For Sharing: Heritage and Multimedia in Africa. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0111

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World Oral Literature Series, vol. 7 | ISSN: 2050-7933 (Print); 2054-362X (Online)

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-318-6

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-319-3

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-320-9

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-321-6

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-322-3

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0111

Cover image: Interview (2008) by ICT4D.at, CC BY-SA 2.0. Image from Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/ict4d/3068125986

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Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK)

Contents

Notes on Contributors

1

Introduction

Daniela Merolla

5

1.

The Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library: The Implications of the Digital Return of Oral Tradition

Jan Bender Shetler

23

2.

Technauriture as a Platform to Create an Inclusive Environment for the Sharing of Research

Russell H. Kaschula

41

3.

From Restitution to Redistribution of Ewe Heritage: Challenges and Prospects

Kofi Dorvlo

61

4.

YouTube in Academic Teaching: A Multimedia Documentation of Siramori Diabaté’s Song “Nanyuman”

Brahima Camara, Graeme Counsel and Jan Jansen

81

5.

New Electronic Resources for Texts in Manding Languages

Valentin Vydrin

109

6.

Questioning “Restitution”: Oral Literature in Madagascar

Brigitte Rasoloniaina and Andriamanivohasina Rakotomalala

123

Afterword: Sharing Located

Mark Turin

143

Notes on Contributors

Brahima Camara is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Linguistics (FLSL, Faculté des Lettres, des Langues et des Sciences du Langage) at the Université des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Bamako (ULSHB), Mali. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Bayreuth in 1998 with a study on Mande hunters’ literature. Brahimaalso researches the tirailleurs and, more recently, the African riflemen who served in the French army. Email: [email protected]

Graeme Counsel is a Lecturer in ethnomusicology for the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne. His recent projects in West Africa include three Endangered Archives Programme awards for which he digitized and preserved the national sound archives of Guinea. Over 7,000 songs from the collection are available online at the British Library Sounds website. Email: [email protected]

Kofi Dorvlo is Senior Lecturer at the General and Liberal Studies Department of the University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ho, Ghana. He gained his undergraduate degree in English and Linguistics at the University of Ghana, and he did his graduate work at the same university, where he was appointed Research Fellow at the Language Centre. He was awarded a Ph.D. from Leiden University in 2008. His doctoral research, which was funded by the Endangered Languages Programme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), focused on the documentation of the language and culture of the Logba people. Email: [email protected]

Jan Jansen obtained his Ph.D. from Leiden University in 1995 with a critical analysis of the oral sources of the Mali Empire. A French edition of his thesis was published in 2001 Épopée-Histoire-Société – Le cas de Soundjata (Mali-Guinée). From 1996 to 1998 he was a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University, and from 1999 to 2004 he was a Research Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), based at Leiden. He then took up his present post as a Lecturer at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University, and since 2010 he has been the managing editor of History in Africa – A Journal of Method, published by Cambridge University Press. Email: [email protected]

Russell H. Kaschula is Professor of African Language Studies and he holds the National Research Foundation (NRF) Chair in the Intellectualisation of African Languages, Multilingualism and Education hosted at Rhodes University, South Africa. Research pertaining to this Chair covers Applied Language Studies, Theoretical Linguistics and Literature. He obtained his Ph.D. in African Oral Poetry from Rhodes, a University to which he returned in 2006, having previously taught in the US. His most recent book, edited together with Ekkehard Wolff, is titled Multilingual Education for Africa: Concepts and Practices (2016). He also developed the literary term “technauriture” in order to create links between technology, aurality and literature. This research was published as a position paper by Cambridge University. His most recent literary work is a collection of short stories entitled Displaced (2013). One of his projects was a critique of the translation of Alice in Wonderland into nine African languages, which was published in the Journal of African Cultural Studies (2015), http://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2016.1160827. Email: [email protected]

Daniela Merolla is Professor in Berber Literature and Art at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), Sorbonne Paris-Cité, and member of the research group LACNAD (Langues et Cultures du Nord de l’Afrique et Diasporas). She taught and researched African Literatures and Media at Leiden University from 2003 to 2015. She obtained her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a dissertation on the interaction of oral and written genres in the construction of identity (Kabylia, Algeria) from Leiden University and the French “habilitation à diriger des recherches” with a work on the Berber/Amazigh multilingual literary space from Aix-Marseille University. Her research focuses on African oral literary productions (Berber/Amazigh) as well as written literatures in African and European languages. Her publications include: Multimedia Research and Documentation of Oral Genres in Africa – The Step Forward (2012) (edited with J. Jansen and K. Naït-Zerrad); Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (2009) (edited with E. Bekers and S. Helff); De l’art de la narration tamazight (berbère) (2006). Email: [email protected]

Andriamanivohasina Rakotomalala is an ethnologist and filmmaker with a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Sociology. His research interests include the ethnology of everyday life, traditional rice farming, and the ancestors’ daily worship in Imerina (Madagascar). His productions include: Un siècle d’enseignement du malgache à Paris (52 minutes), 2000; Saisons du riz en Imerina (52 minutes), 2004; Le culte de Ranavalona à Anosimanjaka, a trilogy (290 minutes), 2014; IRCAM, Douze minutes de conversation avec son secrétaire général le professeur El Houssaïn El Moujahid, Rabat 21 avril 2015 (13 minutes), 2013. Email: [email protected]

Brigitte Rasoloniaina is Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics of Africa and Madagascar (MCF/HDR) at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), Sorbonne Paris-Cité, and a member of the research team PREFics (Plurilinguism, Representations, French Speaking Expressions, Informations, Communication, Sociolinguistic) at the University of Rennes 2. Her research is in the field of the urban linguistic landscape. Her publications include ‘Le passeur de poésie traditionnelle ou à la reconquête du “verbe de ses morts”’, in S. Meitinger, L. Ramarosoa, L. Ink, C. Riffard (eds), Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Œuvres complètes, Tome 2. Le poète, le narrateur, le dramaturge, le critique, le passeur de langues, l’historien (2012). Email: [email protected]

Jan Bender Shetler (Ph.D., University of Florida) is Professor of History at Goshen College. She conducted most of her field research in the Mara Region of Tanzania documenting oral tradition, and in the archives. Her work has explored the history of social memory, identity, environmental relations, and place from precolonial times to the present. Other research includes work in Harar, Ethiopia. She has edited a number of collections of locally written histories from the Mara Region, including Telling Our Own Stories: Local Histories from South Mara, Tanzania (2003), which was a finalist for the 2005 Paul Hair Prize (African Studies Association) and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2003. She is currently working on a book manuscript, A Gendered History of Social Network Memory in the Mara Region, Tanzania, 1880-Present. Recent publications include an edited collection, Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives (2015); a book Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present (2007), and numerous articles for diverse interdisciplinary journals and volumes. Email: [email protected]

Mark Turin is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where he currently serves as Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program and as Acting Co-Director of the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. An anthropologist, linguist, and radio broadcaster, he has worked for twenty-five years in collaborative partnership with indigenous communities in the Himalayan region (Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, and cultural Tibet) and more recently in the Pacific Northwest of Canada. He is the author or co-author of four books, three travel guides, the editor of eight volumes, and the co-editor of the peer-reviewed Open Access journal HIMALAYA. Email: [email protected]

Valentin Vydrin is Professor of Manding at INALCO, Paris, a researcher at Langage, Langues et Cultures d’Afrique Noire (LLACAN), and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has a Ph.D. (with a study on the grammar of the Looma language) from St. Petersburg State University and a habilitation (with a study on the reconstruction of phonology and noun morphology of the Proto-Mande) from the same university. He is the author of numerous publications on the Bambara, Maninka, Looma, and Dan languages as well as on proto-Mande reconstruction and the corpora of the Manding languages. Email: [email protected]

Introduction

Daniela Merolla

© 2017 Daniela Merolla, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0111.08

The unbalanced accumulation of knowledge and material goods since the so-called European expansion1 prompted contemporary African studies to reflect on concepts such as sharing, partnership, restitution, and (re)appropriation.2 The chapters in this volume focus on the specific articulation of such notions when relating to research on oral literature. The researchers engage with multimedia documents that were initially produced within an academic context, challenging their abilities and willingness to think in terms of sharing their work with local communities, organizations, and storytellers. This sharing is significant, as these communities and storytellers were the scholars’ partners in audio-visual research on African oral literatures. We refer to local communities and diasporas who speak the language of the studied genres of folktales, mythical and epic narratives, love poems, funeral lamentations, ritual incantations, urban songs and popular theater, among many others, whether the compositions are faithfully transmitted, renovated, changed, or newly created. The present volume also explores sharing as a method for constructing representative multimedia documents, whether the impetus lies with researchers, artists, or other cultural stakeholders.3

The experiences of “sharing” located in the scientific literature, including those presented in this volume, demonstrate a panorama that is both complex and experiencing rapid development. Sharing data and results among researchers, as well as between researchers and their various publics, is an active field of reflection and discussion. An example of this is the increasing phenomenon of open source publications that offer analyses and data that can be freely accessed.4 In parallel, the issue of copyright — including a debate among the stakeholders of the documented verbal arts about how “rights” are distributed (or not distributed) among them — has become central to discussion of dissemination. For those who work with oral genres, this issue has developed to include an appreciation of “copy-debts”, as Jan Jansen writes (2012). This is an idea intended to convey “the debt that the scholar owes to the community for the work that has been cooperatively produced” (quoted by Shelter in this volume: 33).

Sharing documents on “cultural heritage” with the concerned communities has taken a multimedia dimension since the 1960s. The idea of “shared anthropology” was advanced by the film director and ethnologist Jean Rouch who arranged projections of his films in the villages where he had made them. He also sometimes filmed at the request of documentary protagonists, taking their opinions into account. The reaction of the villagers to their images being included in the final product enriched the documentary by providing multiple perspectives. Nevertheless, such a practice is predicated on a unilateral decision by a film director who decides when and to whom to show the film and how to include people’s reactions in the film’s final version.5 Though an innovative form of ethical restitution, “shared anthropology” still confirmed the power imbalance between the film maker and those being filmed.

The aspiration to “share” documented images was similarly expressed by David McDougall (2003 [1975]: 125) in his “participatory cinema”, which, in the 1970s, called for opening up the process of filmmaking by taking the responses of its “subjects”, i.e. the local participants, into consideration. McDougall argued that, in the end result, this process would improve documentaries:

By giving them [the participants] access to the film, he [the filmmaker]6 makes possible the correction, addition, and illuminations that only their responses to the material can elicit. Through such an exchange a film can begin to reflect the ways in which its subjects perceive the world (McDougall 2003 [1975]: 125).7

A persuasive movement emerged in the 1990s when the notion of “repatriation” became diffused in the field of museums and archives. As indicated by Bell, Christen and Turin (2013), “repatriation” initially focused on the demand for restitution of hundreds of skeletons and bones that were, and sometimes still are, kept in anthropological museums worldwide. Native American, Australian, and African communities requested to have their ancestors’ skeletal remains returned in order to celebrate funerals. Two strikingly painful African examples became known worldwide at the beginning of 2000. Sarah Baartman, a San woman, was repatriated and then buried at Hankey (South Africa) in 2002 after her cast and skeleton had been exposed at the Musée de L’Homme (Paris) until 1974. The so-called “El Negro”, a San man, was buried in the Tsolofelo Park of Gaborone (Botswana) in 2000, after his stuffed remains had been exposed in the Darder Museum of Banyoles (Spain) until the late 1990s.8

Over the past few years, the notion of repatriation has evolved to include a much broader project of restitution, sharing, and appropriation, which currently involves “digital return”.9 The latter term signifies the practice of giving digitalized copies of materials and documentation to local museums and to the communities, families, and individuals that are concerned. Again, this practice incites new questions and criticism concerning those who possess the institutional and individual power of retaining the “originals” and returning the digital “surrogates” (Bell, Christen and Turin 2013: 5, 8).

In the case of audio-video recordings of verbal art, it appears to be less appropriate to speak of the repatriation of “surrogates”, as the copies are near-originals: they all give material form to the performance, or at least to its sounds and visual elements. Digitalization indeed offers a relatively simple way for the researchers to record performances, interviews, and other fieldwork moments, to share such recorded performances, and subsequently to return the digital copies to the concerned individuals by making them accessible online and/or in digital formats (CD-roms, DVDs, SDS cards etc.). In this case, however, other theoretical and ethical issues are encountered alongside many practical problems (see in this volume Shetler: 23 and Camara, Counsel and Jansen: 81). The issues lie not so much in the “original versus copy” conundrum (as in the case of human remains and material objects) but into what type of document the recorded performance is transformed into (see Camara, Counsel and Jansen, this volume: 81; Rasolonaina and Rakotomalala, this volume: 123) and then in the legal, social, and affective relationships that are created (see the contributions by Shetler: 23; Kaschula: 41; Dorvlo: 61; Vydrin: 109 in this volume).

Bauman writes that audio recordings are able “to overcome the ephemerality of the human voice, to capture and fix an utterance […] endowing it with the qualities of an object: autonomy, durability, and even materiality” (2011: 1). At the same time, audio-video recordings create “mirages” of performances because selection and (even when involuntary) manipulation are employed in whatever technique of recording is used, e.g. analogue or digital, audio, visual, or multimedia. As McDougall aptly writes: “The viewfinder […] frames an image for preservation, thereby annihilating the surrounding multitude of images which could have been formed. […] [The image] also becomes, through the denial of all other possible images, a reflection of thought” (2003 [1975]: 123). When a performance is materialized and made autonomous, durable, and object-like by framing and selecting it while capturing it on video, an “object” that can be “shared” or “returned” is created. However, what type of object is this? Do researchers create a reference model or a kind of literary standard from a snapshot? Do they create a “tradition” from the recorded oral genre that, when returned, will be transmitted and revitalized, excluding the versions and genres that are not recorded? Do they participate in the “heritagization” (a term we may derive from “patrimonalisation” in French) of performances becoming museum pieces or tourist objects more than living social interactions? Delving deeper into the issue of selection, do researchers need to collect all that is possible: are all songs and stories or each piece of music equally important/relevant? What is the role of random and non-predictable elements in audio-video recordings?